I\u2019d like to talk about loss in relation to the digital, and, in particular, to the digital moving image. Different kinds of loss will get confused in this brief text: psychological, corporeal; the deliberately spurned, the unknowably gone. Loss will be apprehended both literally and figuratively, oftentimes in a welter of the two. I\u2019m going to lean most heavily on a psychoanalytic figuration and a mortal, existential literalism of loss: two of the limits of loss\u2019s sense. In thinking through some of this, I hope to sketch a particular kind of ethics of literality and figuration, with emphasis on how these two modes are at work in the digital moving image.
\nI should say that loss, here, should be understood in the possessive. As in, all of what follows should be inscrutably caveated by autobiography.
\nThe title of this text is \u201cLosslessness,\u201d loss\u2019s cybernetically bred correlative. Losslessness, in all its awkwardly appended vernacular, refers to a category of data compression algorithm that allows original data to be perfectly reproduced. Losslessness, part abstracted, implicitly invites a mistaking of technology\u2019s progression with a fantasy of immortality. Built-in obsolescence prosaically confused with death: loss proper. Losslessness explicitly pertains to a limitlessness regarding the possible reproducibility of a thing, but it also speculates an end to loss as a precondition of everything. Speculates because losslessness is conjectural and hyperbolic\u2014a relabeling of loss. Empirically, losslessness, as some kind of paradoxical annexation, is itself always already lost to experience, is simply another category of loss. Literal empiricism, however, is an ever more rarified position. Contemporary digital reproductions\u2019s persistent demonstration of a lossless material promise sufficiently ironizes loss\u2019s hegemony over The Inevitable (and over experience\u2019s veracity), particularly when reality\u2019s already dubious actuality has become so fantastically subtended by the digital, enough to shift loss\u2019s proximity to materially personal experience. Loss, felt, gets repressed at a clip equivalent to the refresh rate of an infinite reproduction, dissembling loss through its immortal figuration and, with it, those things that might previously have been mourned when lost.
\nLoss, in the technological, specifically digital sense, has all but shrugged off its physical, etymological forebears. Like rendering, capturing, processing, etc., loss is a negative effect of a now welcomely obsoleted failure of tech. Losslessness is a solution to a problem concocted inside the language and its particular tech semiology, a kind of problem modeled, coolly, according to some successional capitalistic paradigm, rendered a weird sort of natural\u2014a kind of evolution as in-built obsoletism. A disinterested suspension\u2014as if of insuperable nature\u2014apart. Such disinterest permeates seeming technological straightforwardness, too, saturating not just its lexica but also our presumption of the innateness of its processes. It\u2019s a sleight that conflates capitalism\u2019s waveform of progress and dissimulates certain desires and meanings behind planned obsolescence, differentiated from, say, the evolution of Galapagos finches away from whatever Galapagos finches were before they were Galapagos finches. Insofar as it sticks evolutionary process with the motives of design, tech\u2019s natural world has a distinctly creationist hue, a tack that could be the MO of certain consumer products: user-friendliness more often than not pervades in order to maintain ignorance and to support economically justified mollification. The kind of capitulation that a spiritualistic natural world might ethically urge needs either some sort of heuristic detachment or a comfortingly justifiable disregard of material and mortal experiences and consequence. Experiences and consequences of loss, in our example. In a so-called natural order of things, technology is in thrall to other, larger celestial movements. This means that left uninterrupted, in due course it\u2019s liable to be straightforwardly disposed of\u2014according to the logic of capitalistic progress\u2014at the altar of obsolescence and its erroneous determination as \u201cnatural.\u201d On these terms, mortality confers only the loss of value and timely replacement. Mortality, here, is a pejorative. Or a violence allegorized, even as it burlesques the truly mortal by pertaining to inevitability. This violence divests mortality of a great slew of attendant undertakings: care, mourning, intimacy, affective recognition, all of which are in direct correspondence with mortality\u2014but only if mortality is understood as ontological. Only if mortality is a condition of life rather than of economic process\u2014and only if it is understood literally rather than figuratively.
\nThe relationship between the literal and the figurative is fraught. A given literal meaning is more often than not in disagreement\u2014if not political conflict\u2014with the figurative meaning. This paradoxical inherence is rehearsed at every stage of the stuff I make and, I would argue, is at the heart of my practice\u2019s attempt at a document: its attempt to encounter and afford the paradoxes of its seeming contingencies in order to better propose how it might break or resolve certain misplaced ironies and dissimulations, to in turn affirm a kind of caring application of the literal and the figurative.
\nIn the videos I make, I want to underscore my attachment to the vicissitudes of the technologies that describe the works\u2019 limits, to make conspicuous the necessity of any technologically incumbent artist\u2019s attachment to the vicissitudes of their chosen medium. An artist\u2019s first approach to some glistening new tech will more often than not be to cleave to the edge of the tech, to trace its perimeter in order to figure whatever aspect ratios or resolutions and all the other hindering apparatuses of apparent A\/V fidelity as literal. This is initially for the purposes of exposition and, latterly, for the particular elucidatory pleasures of finitude. In so doing, an artist might be seen to be incorporating the tech. As in, making it corporeal, analogue, mortal. Moving toward the world with a Freudian lope, sadistically, preemptively: the subject\/ object relation seemingly built entirely around sadism\u2019s hegemony as ur-relation, a presumed preventative feint just to be sure.
\nThis literality is a rebuttal of the desires of the tech\u2014its apparent correct usage and, at the other end, its specialist unpacking. The artist\u2019s relationship to the use of a piece of technology, the complexity of which makes its parameters far more restricted than, say, a pencil, is to reject the very idea of use. And because so many of the desires of a technology relate to upholding its inconspicuousness, one of the first things an artist might do when wielding it is to retrieve the technology from whatever quagmire of figuration it had sequestered itself in. Whether that figurative hiding place is representational verisimilitude or disappearance from the field of view by extreme intimacy or extimacy to its user, the technology constantly seeks to be lost. The consumer-grade portion of tech finds some figured endophytic relation to its user, whereas the specialist piece of kit is figured alien\u2014almost state-level alien, like the military or industry or space or whatever other intangible. It is, perhaps, hyper-objectivised: pushed to a point of irretrievable unwieldiness. The exponential growth of these relations is cybernetics proper, even if for me, it\u2019s perhaps more appositely considered through the mutable lens of psychoanalysis. To reiterate and to be clear: loss is our exemplar. Both poles of proximity (consumer\/ specialist) vanish the tech to the general populace. Certainly to ideological ends, but also for more convoluted reasons. The tech\u2019s vanishing is part of a maintenance of a fantasy of holism, coherency. Or perhaps the loss of the tech obtains the seeming maintenance of the ego and the ego\u2019s correctly deluded place, hierarchically speaking.
\n\u201cCorrect usage,\u201d as regards a piece of technology, is a pragmatic normality that bleeds out into ideology, social determinism, and so on. The artist must first set out to find the technology. Or rather, the artist must first understand the technology as lost. This finding is cast metaphorically, although there is, relatively speaking, a movement toward the literal in this retrieval. If unacknowledged absence is the precondition of technology\u2019s successful ebb, then the figurative act of finding is, at least, a literal act of making present. In this account, technology proper is always already lost, and by disingenuous design. Ignorance is a kind of pall to appease guilt. So, the subject bypasses the need for the object by regarding it as a loss beyond the reach of the self: the subterranean of the tech\u2014its reality\u2014is apparently beyond impactful range. The loss is never understood, simply repressed. Insofar as the lost object becomes internalised through its dissimulation, the relationship is neurotic, according to Freudian psychoanalysis.
\nIn most cases, where the ethics of corporate industry, factory conditions, state violence, environmental horror, political doctrinairism, etc. are known (and this, really, is most of the time \u2014if not at least suspected all of the time), the consciously oblivious loss of technology is entirely desirable in order to repress the trauma of the technology\u2019s fact. This kind of imperative repression\u2014imperative in order to function coherently, according to all kinds of vast, contractual mores\u2014creates a kind of aimless melancholy or shame. An awful, disinterested shrug laps the melancholic. In contrast, acknowledging the lost object sets in motion a shift from melancholy to purposive mourning. By example, acknowledging the bodies traumatised in coltan mines and sweatshops retrieves those bodies, allows the possibility of mourning them, of witnessing their loss.
\nMore banally, sufficiently acknowledging that the movies are constituted by a procession of lifelessness\u2014that the moving image is an illusion\u2014simultaneously finds those intestinal coils of celluloid and the ideological engine behind that illusion. Mourning might best be thought of as a way of properly tracking and acknowledging loss, whether in death or knowledge or empathy or truth. Suddenly the camera is visible in the mirror. The VHS tracking remains permanently, deliberately unresolved, becomes rhythmic. Music and foley buzz and keel, then abruptly cut. The world and its representation are distinguished; imminence evades narration. Melancholia transmutes into mourning and the real work can begin.
\nLiterality can only be a functionary of recouping the mortal when such recoupment relates to matter. Structuralist approaches to the moving image understand the difference between effect and reality. By uncovering the workings, whether celluloid or shutter, one analogies the \u201cuncovering\u201d of other realities. One repudiates illusions of all kinds by repudiating the illusion of the moving image. Making literal, here, flows into the figurative, while analogy or metaphor must appear in order for the act to mean beyond whatever microcosm. The process is parabolic, requiring significant relation between, say, persistence of vision and propaganda. Fundamentally, both the structural and deconstructive methods require that there be a thing of which it is possible to expose the structure. It subsequently requires that the illusion either remain or be put back in place to allow sufficient function to sustain critique. And, really, a particular order of movement between literal and figurative is necessary for structuralism to function.
\nClearly, this pertains to the mortal analogue above, insofar as uncovering the workings of the living body means violence or can better be described via abjection. As regards the moving image, illusion is a condition of its being: a suspension of disbelief is a condition of its encounter, even if that suspension of disbelief is in turn suspended by the insistence of its partial dismantling for the sake of structural comprehension. In other words, the simultaneous and continued functioning of structure with its surface, while they are simultaneously observed, is essential to the reading. Like understanding how a cat works by observing its innards while it continues to work, engine purring. If retrieving the lost object of a moving image technology lies in exposing its material reality as well as the lives, processes, and politics that flow into a materiality deferred by the illusion that defines the medium, then acknowledging it is made possible by structural revelation simultaneous with continued function. Critically, this happens in a movement that is more or less against the desires of that technology. Insofar as this process is political, it also abounds with agency: deconstructing the object confers the freedom of the subject. The literal is asserted in order to re-find figuration.
\nFigural to literal to figural: the lost object is acknowledged as lost in order to counter the neurotic consequences of repression and to begin a reparative move from melancholia to mourning. Mourning is mantric, inasmuch as it involves the naming of an object through the description of its absence, while literalisation is equivalent to death, where both find their subject, retrieve them from the disbelief of a life, of figuration, while affirming the absence of the very thing of which they affirm the finitude. Literalisation renders loss rather than the thing that was lost. Literalisation describes the figurative as such: it delimits its existence by divulging its immanence.
\nThe literal is the end of language. And all of this is profoundly complicated by the digital. If technology\u2019s implicit desire is to disappear by a movement of natural progress, the digital pushes that figurative idea towards the literal. The digital borders, both figuration and the literal, unmooring both, disrupting how the two might move between one another and be recognisable as one rather than the other. Digital technologies seem so fiercely figured and so wholly welcomed and afforded as a kind of ethical relief, the combination of which is most conspicuously capable of eroding the capacity to tell the difference between what is and what is not. Or, more opaquely, what is and what is also, with that \u201calso\u201d a fine print of terms and conditions to unspool in great, abject reports from far away and next door, to be scrolled blithely through in order to reach the \u201cI agree\u201d checkbox.
\nA confusion of literality and figuration means that \u201cthe cloud\u201d remains a cloud, literally, while also operating as an image of a cloud\u2014the one obliterates the conditions of the other, sending clouds, along with whatever acceded personal details, to some weird no-place of fug and ignorance and clouds, literally. The digital does not have literal analogues. To return to mourning and melancholia, the digital represses its lost object by literal figuration, and those neurotic symptoms that riddle the melancholic become a condition of the digital. Somewhere over there, countless acres of bunkered server farms wolf inestimable amounts of energy, overheating and strobing and storing and producing illusions playing out thousands of miles away, out of sight and out of mind.
\nMelancholia suffuses and neurotic tics of shame and guilt play across faces quieted by an ignorance advanced by those impossible, labyrinthine convolutions that constitute digital figuration and its disappeared literal structure. Losslessness abounds, and the mourning made possible by naming it\u2014by affirming it in order to process it\u2014is made figurative, literally.
\nWriting this, I\u2019m struck by the queasy clarity of my own neuroses, as well as their positive motility: how I\u2019ve almost always wanted my videos to firstly be analogous to people, to bodies, to experience, to loss. For my videos to stand as a kind of metaphysical surrogate for what I long for: the finite holism of a person\u2019s existence. For years, I rehearsed the idea that the videos I was making were dead men, albeit figuratively speaking. Descended, psychically, from that literal dead man who began this whole sorry mess for me. Making videos became about reparative mourning, though not therapy, per se\u2014extending outwards from mourning\u2019s most literal, funereal wellspring to address a whole host of melancholic, neurotic attachments and transposing them into aspects of my life that could be understood\u2014if never, importantly, got (there is nothing of applicable use or value here, at the wake). Most importantly, mourning intuits the moving image in a way that felt like forcible congruence at first, but which has expanded to encounter the structure of the medium, its affective modes, its burlesque of substance dualism\u2014 its striving for representational cogency. Immanence, as the loop of every video I make asserts, circumscribes fidelity and stands against losslessness. Loss is the sublime condition of any experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10838,"template":"","artista":[199],"archivio_esposto":[201],"fellows":[185],"tipo_commitment":[85],"class_list":["post-10854","commitment","type-commitment","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","artista-ed-atkins","archivio_esposto-ed-atkins-en","fellows-ed-atkins-en","tipo_commitment-digital-fellowship"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n